Jane's Stuff

Jane enjoys drawing and painting. Join her. Doodling, drawing, ART - all of it is great for brain health! Check out Jane's Youtube channel below. And if you see a picture on my blog you would like to purchase send Jane an email (or check out Jane's store).

Anyway, I really like this book because...well, I don't know why. It is one of the books I read when I am a bit lost, a bit unsettled. I identify with Princess Addie, the main character in the book (even though she is a teenager and I am almost 47 years old).

I was reading it aloud to my son Hawken. And then Hawk fell asleep. So I started doodling and drew a dragon. I messed up its eyes but then realized the dragon I drew was blinded by some fight it found itself in. I like how Levine portrays dragons in this book. She compares one dragon to a cat when it is curled up. That got me to thinking how I'd like to write a book that included dragons with even more similarities to cats -- at least their personalities.

We'll see. I don't know what my writing future holds. I don' t know much of anything right now.

My kitchen floor has been a trial since we moved into our house in 2006. It had layers of yuck piled on it. First there was some carpet thrown on it that didn't belong. I took that off to find 50 year old kitchen carpet that was filthy. I took that off to find 50 year old broken up tile with gooey junk stuck to originally a nice wood floor. For the next several years I did my best to get down to the wood floor. This year I finally gave up. Parts of I cleaned off but even these had gouges in them and since it is real wood, age and temperature had put gaps in the wood and there was just no way for me to get a clean floor.

I didn't have much money to put toward a floor so I bought the 12 by 12 inch sticky tiles -- one 20 piece pack at a time.

I'm not a floor layer and so there were a few tiny gaps. I wasn't going to start over but I wanted it to look decent. I filled in the few gaps (some very slight) with building compound and then after trying several things realized I just needed to paint over this with waterproof acrylic paint.

What's that got to do with art?

I had to get a paintbrush and paint out. I haven't used any acrylics for two years. The last painting I did was one in memory of my daughter Maggie. It was a large painting. See below:

For those interested the "canvas" I used was the back of a hollow door. It worked out great!

Anyway, I had paint left over from the floor this morning and I didnt' want it to go to waste so I put some marks on a page:

I'll make that into something later.

But then I thought -- I still have some paint. Let's get a canvas I can paint over.

So I did and here is my painted over wood canvas that I hope to work on more (gotta get more paint now):

I don't know what this will become but it felt so good to paint. And I thought of something that is in the book of Revelation. It's in red letters so you know it's important. It says "remember your first love."

It wasn't talking about painting, but there is a principle here. Sometimes if we do the things we used to do that we haven't for a while we'll remember something we forgot.